PART FOUR: THE SUN OF LIGHT CHAPTER XXXVIII: THE GIVEN NAMES

Boooooooooom. Luke’s tale ended thus, like a thunder, like a cannon shot. It took me some minutes to realize he had actually ended. With the excuse of the beggar of the thousand names, he had given a review of my recent life as beautiful as harmonious. I would not have known how to tell it, owner of my own facts, as he told it. For me it would be like getting naked. Instead, with his voice, it sounded as if it could not be otherwise, and calmed. I could not help but wonder how long it might have taken him to make it, such beauty! Such effort! His story was intended to accompany me throughout my time, whataver the road. An unexpected gift that life made me. It is not surprising that I have remembered each syllable. But what is your opinion, Protch?

CHAPTER XXXIX: THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

  I preferred catching the net of what was already my daily life smoothly. But it was the night that all the veils should fall, and Luke, my dear mate, did not have mercy on me, and was on the verge of throwing me the last of his stings, as if my life had to go from a harmful animal to a harmful animal so that all of them resurrected me. I could not see that he tormented me because he loved me, so that there were no more secrets that could separate us again, no reason why I still had to cry. He had hinted at it in the story, but finally he did say it, the question I feared most:

CHAPTER XL: THIRD SACRED COUPLE

  Playful like tiny spiders that swung in its folds, the latest stars were adorning the curtains of the day, before being drawn back. The last raindrops were arabesques with the leaf litter. The wet ground smelled like bread, like a cake fermented by the downpour. In that mosaic of dawn, fragrant of water, earth and stars, I stopped a second under the alders to cry. On this occasion, after months of pain, my tears were messengers of a new sensation. In 29 years it had not caressed me yet and the first time it did I knew it was coming to stay. Happiness, once so elusive, must be bathing me as the ground must be wetted by the moisture from my eyes, which flooded me. Oh happiness of that dawn, beautiful as my two loves. My heart always allowed me from then on to love them, and the door that opened those months has not been closed yet. Perhaps, if it is not previously reached by the dreaded startle, it will never close the door to them.

CHAPTER XLI: LIBERTY

     Liberty is the goddess gull that flies constantly over your sea, but it rarely perches; it is born without a cradle, for all men, for whoever wants with courage to take it; it grows up in shocks and many times it withers; and if it lives, it can be born and die as that malnourished infant who does not survive a few days, but once it is known and reached, you can live your entire life with its lighthouse. There I was, Liberty, a captive of your wings, considering what I already had in a long period of reflection. I did not need any more mirrors to know that I would stay forever next to my mates. And fear had given way to a shocking bird, with repaired wings, of love for Lucy and Luke which now I needn’t hide. Those days from the end of October I started to deliberate. I recalled an advice of my beloved girl who recommended me to meditate on the first part of the enigma and only if I was able to solve it, see if I could accept the second and finally the third part. This day 21 was still unexpected summer, but the next day cold and rain returned and the clouds in my mind persisted when my musings began seriously, but I could reach nowhere.

CHAPTER XLII: HORROR

   Horror is a ruffian who penetrates your body like a virus, an invader that clogs your blood, exacerbates your nerves and corrodes your bones and also eats away your mind and your soul and leaves you close to destroy your heart and paralyze you. In Mistress Oakes’ cosmology it was a positive gift and it was difficult to see it that way. But years have made me see that she was right. It is an indispensable teacher who gives you the maturity you need to evolve. And if it is true that after it I was going to get some Wisdom, I can only say that after the Horror of that day with two faces, I assumed the only Wisdom I have considered essential: to finally find myself and start a family.

CHAPTER XLIII: ONE SHOCK AFTER ANOTHER

   Dawn was a flame of let down hair that caressed the alders and the wind was a comb with teeth of wood that embellished and adorned it. Or maybe it was that once our love was consummated, Luke and I returned home without sleep and coherent words or not, embraced in the alder grove the day that began. And arriving at the camp Lucy showed us a second orange sunrise, a mixture of the shy yellow of the day with her reddish hair.

CHAPTER XLIV: CLARITY

   Doctors had fulfilled their obligations. He was in the operating room more than one hour, but to us, in a large waiting room, it was like two hours. At this distressing time, it was all tears and memories and the three women evoked in tears those years when they were four and with Bruce they had felt they were protected, first gentleman and shield before the rough times of the future. My first mate was absent-minded, as if she could not remove the burden of guilt for what had happened. At a time when she stood up I went towards her. Something inside her told me that she wanted us to speak, and I should call her by her name. It is difficult to explain that it was a call, it was not clairvoyance.

CHAPTER XLV: TEMPTATION

   My first winter in the street wanted to be noticed in the trees, naked and emaciated, which were spectral and ghostly, the wind a whip in the hands of a sadist who flogged them and opened their flesh. The sacred trees had to necessarily die first in order to resurrect, not on the third day, but in spring. It wanted to be noticed in the sun, crestfallen and faded, knowing that it was losing its usual battle with the clouds, which discharged their tears in a too melodic and rhythmic frequency and made us open our umbrellas every day and it was difficult to dry our soaked clothes. Days of January and February when the couple who slept alone in our outskirt had to run to take refuge in "the house." But the winter was also noticeable in the stars, arrows of heat in Taurus and Gemini, in the undetectable Cancer, and glorious Leo, already visible at the time of the bonfires.

CHAPTER XLVI: EXCLUSION

   Winds of loneliness, storm, rain, drizzle, watering, Miguel’s ideas were blowing in the air and exploded, bathing Luke in a mist of bitterness, a new unpleasant winter on a changeable spring. He watched Lucy's belly with acrimony and it was obvious that he objected to what his eyes saw. His disoriented mind, of an orphan who had just lost three of his bloods, turned purple and became red, an icy frost that froze our three warm hearts. And finally the tainted water of misunderstanding was spilled in his words.

CHAPTER XLVII: THE RABBLE

   I loved both of them. It is hard to make you understand that it was not lust, but true love. My heart has forked - Lucy had not told yet any story, and I shuddered when I knew who she was speaking to. My beloved disciple narrated at times in my presence, and finally she would sum up her tale for me, a story which ultimately rather than a tale, was a gospel, because she told her life, brief, with new chapters for Luke and me – like tunnels in an ancient cave with cave paintings in homage to more than one hunting god. The Earth was opened for me, curved and adopted the shape of a cradle to give me a shelter and rock me and I spent my life in this fertile cradle. I loved both of them and forever will I love them.

CHAPTER XLVIII: THE EMPRESS

   The light of that warm summer, dressed in spring, fulfilled well its duty to shine, but not that of giving heat. It is true that clarity lasted longer, but rays did not cover you and the nights were freezing. Through the windows of the river, reeds dripped garlands of summer breeze with prudery of true seasonal temperature. July was bearable and the stars were the scenes of a luminous curtain putting a ceiling of bright daisies where the Scorpion crouched again.

CHAPTER IL: DIRT

   The elm leaves were already dripping, a fountain that cried a new litter of gold to the ground. They lost their clothes but they would have them on in spring again and new shoots would sprout. But they should not find clothing, like us, in the landfill. They had them inside, and the branches would be bedecked with a new costume in a majestic and perennial cycle. But in autumn the show is not looking at the trees, but looking at the ground. The Umbra Terrae Boulevard was an abstract carpet where you could see strange drawings of many symbolic sketches, of many incomprehensible charms.

CHAPTER L: THE EMBRACE

   The Torn Hand is not paradise, but it has sacred trees... and snakes. My house, in short, has a beautiful garden and no angels of flaming swords which, by order of a righteous God, drive us out of our Eden. Freedom without sin, Wisdom without charity, Beauty without compassion. It is not between the Tigris and the Euphrates, but we live surrounded by two rivers. And although the city does not have a sea, we cool off in the crystal of the lake. And the days pass without Cains or Abels, without biblical curses, with nothing, but with everything. I have to make an effort to summarize and tell you the most important things of past years, where there still are surprises or beauty, where the life I want to live, already assumed, has placed me definitely;  my homeland a burning carpet, from the roots of the trees to the stardust.